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How Winston Churchill’s great-granddaughter is shaping home decor trends

The celebrated English decorator talks taste, memory and creating a beautiful — and deeply personal — home.

Family matters Wallpaper and fabric designer Flora Soames at home in the English countryside with her daughter, Lily Hope. Picture: Simon Upton
Family matters Wallpaper and fabric designer Flora Soames at home in the English countryside with her daughter, Lily Hope. Picture: Simon Upton

Flora Soames often suffers from homesickness. The English interior decorator, author and the great-granddaughter of former British prime minister Winston Churchill, has always felt this pull towards home.

“I think that is driven by my sense of home as a child and the strength that place held in all of our lives,” she says. “I go to London tomorrow for 24 hours for work. And from the moment I leave, I am homesick for coming back. I think it’s a real driving force for me. And it’s as much about the home as it is the people in it.”

Homemaking is something she learned from her mother, and also her paternal grandmother, the quite remarkable Mary Churchill, the youngest of Winston’s five children. So, too, a sense of searching for, and finding, joy in life when you can.

“My grandmother, my father’s mother, lived an extraordinary life. She was Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, and very much lived a life by her parents’ side, sort of upholding their legacy,” says Soames from her home in Dorset, in the southwestern English countryside, where she lives with her husband, ceramics artist Blondie Macdonald-Buchanan, and their young daughter, Lily Hope. She also has two stepchildren.

The role of pattern in creating a mood is a lifelong passion for Flora Soames. Picture: Simon Upton
The role of pattern in creating a mood is a lifelong passion for Flora Soames. Picture: Simon Upton
Flora Soames wallpaper and fabrics with a nostalgic bent. Picture: Simon Upton
Flora Soames wallpaper and fabrics with a nostalgic bent. Picture: Simon Upton

“She was incredibly dedicated to her legacy and with such integrity, but she was also very committed to living her own life and her married life. She was a mother of five children and she had an extraordinary way of being able to balance all of that. But she was a real homemaker. She took great pleasure in her garden. She recorded everything. She kept a diary of what she planted in her garden and kept nearly every recipe,” shares Soames.

“She was writing the biography of her mother, which is a sort of extraordinary undertaking, as well as many others. But there was this real sense of getting enjoyment out of the documenting of one’s life. And she made a lovely home. She lived with extraordinary things. But also there was a real lightness of touch to it and a sense of humour. Her father’s dispatch box was by her front door with her dog-poo bags in it.”

Soames is also known for her charmingly nostalgic and cheerily classic fabrics and wallpaper designs. She spent her teens and early twenties ferreting out antique wallpaper and fabric scraps that eventually filled trunks in her home. And it was this lifelong love of collecting that formed the beginnings of her own forays into fabric design, and eventually her book, The One Day Box: A Life-Changing Love of Home, published by Rizzoli in 2023.

Flora Soames floral motifs ring a sense of whimsy and joy to a bedroom. Picture: Simon Upton
Flora Soames floral motifs ring a sense of whimsy and joy to a bedroom. Picture: Simon Upton

“Collecting, for me, it’s sort of a compulsive thing. The fact that I started very young, I didn’t know I was collecting. I just knew there’s a process of buying, keeping, amassing, but also sort of putting on a shelf … the wider ritual of it all was something that really resonated with me,” she says.

These magpie instincts she picked up from her maternal grandmother, but also her mother and her sister. They refer to the letters and cards and feathers and pebbles they pick up from the beach and keep as the “wallpaper of our lives”.

Don’t miss your copy of the June issue of WISH magazine in The Australian available on Friday, June 6

Vintage daybeds covered in Flora Soames whimsical poplins, part of the designers fabric and wallpaper range. Picture: Simon Upton
Vintage daybeds covered in Flora Soames whimsical poplins, part of the designers fabric and wallpaper range. Picture: Simon Upton
Charlotte Tilbury is on the cover of this month’s edition of WISH magazine. Picture: Matt Easton
Charlotte Tilbury is on the cover of this month’s edition of WISH magazine. Picture: Matt Easton

“I come from a family of collectors. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, loved nothing more than going to the local car-boot sale. For her it was like panning for gold and I did it with her,” she says.

“The value of something was never important, it was chipped china in her case, second-hand clothes, and she took great pleasure in it. As I got older … in terms of decorating my room at university, hanging old bits of fabric on the wall, moving to Italy, taking some of my belongings to make it feel personal to me, I saw real value in those things. Whether they were new or old or had been passed down the generations or whatever.”

Soames’s collecting informs her approach with clients also. She came to interior design almost by accident, and more likely by instinct, following studies in art history and a formative stint working at an auction house.

If you are the kind of client who wants a prescribed “aesthetic” as dictated by Pinterest, Soames will quickly say she is not the designer for you. Instead, her homes are richly layered; not only in her love for texture, patterns, colour and fabric, but with the tapestry of its occupants’ lives. This she sees as an enormous privilege of her job. Especially, as she points out, as people often work with her at times of great change in their lives.

The drawing rooms Semley armchairs, Barsham sofas and Maud chairs all upholstered in Flora Soames signature fabrics. Picture: Simon Upton
The drawing rooms Semley armchairs, Barsham sofas and Maud chairs all upholstered in Flora Soames signature fabrics. Picture: Simon Upton

“It’s a deeply personal and sometimes quite intrusive sort of process,” she says.

“Also, you are working with someone at pivotal stages in their life. They’re moving house, they might be scaling up, they might be scaling down, they might be getting married, about to have their third baby. Sometimes they’ve separated and had a huge crossroads in their life.”

One client to make an impact on Soames was a recently widowed gentleman who had been married for 55 years. “He was just an extraordinary, kind, emotionally charged man. And it was such a privilege to be able to work with him at that stage in his life. And you are helping people make brave and bold decisions and you are possibly encouraging them to look at something in a certain way. By that, again, it’s not like the colour on a wall for me. It’s saying, ‘Maybe now you are just cooking dinner for one, you’ll eat here and that will bring you comfort’, and what a privilege to help them,” she says.

“I think you get access to these real moments and that’s how I see it, and I hope how I go about nurturing that in a funny way with them.”

Flora Soames Sunny poplin stripes in the orangery. Picture: Simon Upton
Flora Soames Sunny poplin stripes in the orangery. Picture: Simon Upton
Flora Soames Dahlias wallpaper in Parchment makes a statement in a bathroom. Picture: Simon Upton
Flora Soames Dahlias wallpaper in Parchment makes a statement in a bathroom. Picture: Simon Upton

Soames launched her decorating business in 2009 after a few friends who admired her eye asked for help to do their own interiors. The textiles and wallpaper business followed in 2019. Soames now ships around the world, with the US a particularly big market. Currently she is stocked at the John Rosselli & Associates showroom in New York and in Texas with James. A store in London is a one-day plan.

Soames believes part of the reason her fabrics and furnishings resonate is because of their integrity: everything is made in the UK by trained artisans.

“I think you can see that it has been crafted with real integrity and quality, and that is something that I think you can spot a mile off … if I’m asking someone to pay what I’m asking them to pay for a roll of wallpaper, I want them to be able to feel and see how it’s been printed. I think the argument that people can’t tell the difference is not valid for me,” she says.

“We live in a world where people want to know what they’re putting on their face. They want to know what they’re putting in their mouth. And they want to know what they’re putting in their house.”

The outdoor table set for supper in a selection of Flora Soames fabrics. Picture: Simon Upton
The outdoor table set for supper in a selection of Flora Soames fabrics. Picture: Simon Upton

The sense of the personal and a family’s tapestry of memories and meaning that imbues her approach to interior decoration means Soames is also quite indifferent to the idea of taste – good, bad, absolutely none. “I think that taste is very individual and it’s one’s own … good taste, bad taste. I mean, people say you’ve either got it or you haven’t. I don’t believe in that. It is what you want it to be. It holds as important a place in your life as you want it to hold,” she says.

Still, she has her view on what makes something feel right, and that is actually something a bit wrong.

“I certainly think every room, every outfit needs a bit of ‘off’. I think that’s what makes life interesting. Striving for too perfect or seamless an interior or an outfit I think lacks personality. I think taste is what you make it and it’s deeply individual,” she says. Honing the eye, however, is something Soames believes in.

“We live in a world where the assault of imagery and content is vast. And I think reading, visiting exhibitions, social media is great for that. Instagram is wonderful for being able to access other worlds. I think it’s just a dedication to whatever interests you really,” she says of how to go about doing so.

“I have a pile by my bed of books and magazines and [with] finding the time – I’m never reading anything from cover to cover but delving into it now and then. I think the moment that you come across something that’s new or that’s of interest, go down the rabbit hole of investigating what that is.”

Learning what you don’t like is something Soames believes is especially important; perhaps even more so than what you do. “That’s something I really encourage my clients to do,” she says.

Vintage daybeds in Flora Soames clean poplin stripes invite poolside lounging. Picture: Simon Upton
Vintage daybeds in Flora Soames clean poplin stripes invite poolside lounging. Picture: Simon Upton
There is no personality in perfection, says Flora Soames, designer. Picture: Simon Upton
There is no personality in perfection, says Flora Soames, designer. Picture: Simon Upton

One of her own style inspirations was Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. “Debo”, the youngest of the blue-blooded Mitford family and chatelaine of historic Chatsworth house, famously loved her chickens as much as she loved fashion.

Soames bought a few pieces from a sale after the dowager duchess’s death, including an embroidered bull’s head that turned out to be larger than she could ever have imagined.

“Sotheby’s said I had to send a van and it’s sort of huge and it sits in my kitchen and I love it. I think [people like the dowager duchess] are homemakers and their style is very true to themselves. They’re decorating for themselves. They’re not decorating for anyone else. I love it when that’s what I’m doing with my clients, when it’s about them and their family and their family’s experience in a space. I am not the decorator to create a museum. It’s not how I see or do things,” she says.

“There are a lot of us decorators out there, and it’s horses for courses. I think the people who are buying into it with me, they are buying into that sort of collecting story. They are buying into putting together and creating a very personal home. The making of memories and carrying them is something that’s really important to me.”


This story is from the June issue of WISH.

Annie BrownWatch & Jewellery Editor The Australian Prestige & Conde Nast Titles

Annie Brown is watch and jewellery editor across The Australian's prestige and Conde Nast titles. She has worked as a luxury and fashion journalist for 15 years, covering all aspects of the industry. Prior to joining News Prestige Annie worked at The Sydney Morning Herald. Her journalism has been published in The Australian Financial Review, The South China Morning Post and fashion titles both in Australia and around the world.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/wish/how-winston-churchills-greatgranddaughter-is-shaping-home-decor-trends/news-story/9b46cd202568163825870dcf74beccd4